How HPMoR Should Have Ended
by Markus Ramikin
Summary: Spoilers, obviously. If you haven't read HPMoR yet, what the sweet slitherin' snakes are you waiting for?
1. Chapter 1

Harry's scar twinged one last time when the steel ring went on his pinky finger, holding the tiny green emerald in contact with his skin. Then his scar subsided, and did not hurt again.

Harry took another deep breath, still inhaling through his mouth even though this, rather than keeping from him the smell of the blood in the air, was just adding _taste_ to the mix. He said "Lumos," and looked around the graveyard.

Black robes and severed skull masks, surrounded by pools of blood -

Harry found he had increasing problems breathing.

Harry knew that if he truly stopped to think about what he'd just done...

Thirty-six human beings.

(A catch in the breath, a double vision...)

When trapped in Azkaban, he'd considered solving his problems by removing a human being, one whose memories were _inconvenient_ to him. There was a part of him that thought that was an okay way to solve problems.

There was a part of him, a _remnant_, which thought that that was _totally not what he was about_.

(A network of horcruxes, confused, searched for the necessary living focal point, to complete the circuit... and found one that was almost a perfect match.)

And only one of those two parts could walk away from having killed thirty-six people at the age of eleven with its sanity intact.

(The circuit closed.)

A boy stood under the night sky, and found a feeling of... something that wasn't gratitude, but resembled it in a way, towards the late Professor Quirrel.

The boy's lips formed words.

"I cannot possibly get anything done in life if I am not willing to defeat my enemies."

"I have defeated some of my enemies today."

"I am a good boy."

Just like last time, it made him feel better.

* * *

Some time later...

"Hello, Miss Granger. Are you ready to resume your service to House Potter?"


	2. Chapter 2

A clearing in an unspecified, uninhabited location. Two boys, one woman. And an unconscious mountain troll.

Lesath Lestrange was speaking an eldritch chant. He had carefully memorized it, after studying with the help of a pensieve a memory of Voldemort performing a certain ritual. The memory belonged to Tom Riddle, known to the world as Harry Potter, who was the other person currently in the clearing. Tom/Harry wasn't performing the ritual himself, because he had no idea if it was allowed for the recipient to do so. Voldemort had only done it for Hermione...

Lesath finished speaking, and the mountain troll crumbled in on itself, becoming ashes hanging in the air, then dust.

Tom had felt nothing. Anticlimactic, but the Stone and the Mirror had taught him to expect as much.

"Did it work, my Lord?" asked Lesath.

"Let's find out."

Tom took a sterile needle from Lesath, unwrapped it, and pricked himself on the arm. The wound closed immediately. First test passed.

Tom nodded at Lesath, who took out his wand and aimed it at Tom's arm.

Softly, his voice trembling a little in awe at this apparent show of trust (exactly as Tom expected, wasn't Legilimency wonderful), the boy spoke.

"Diffindo".

"Ouch", said the other boy.

In a moment, that wound closed as well. Tom smiled.

The survival of the world required a live Harry Potter. Preferably, a Harry Potter as close to invincibility as possible, and without all the trouble that would arise from certain people learning that he had inherited Voldemort's network of horcruxes.

Lesath returned the smile, though it was a pale one. He knew he wouldn't be allowed to remember the details of this adventure, but he'd remember _how it felt_, and Lord Potter would let him know that he'd performed a useful service. This had happened once before, on the day when Hermione Granger came back to life, and they both expected it would happen again in the future.

Bellatrix' role was to provide high level protection, standing guard at the edge of the temporary wards they'd set up.

Tom wondered briefly how long he had before the trainwreck that was Hermione Granger was done hunting down the Dementors that escaped the Azkaban purge. He wasn't fully reassured either by Hermione's loyalty vow, or by what remained of their friendship, and his own Vow required Hermione's cooperation for his research to progress. It didn't have to be willing cooperation... But even the Elder Wand only gave Tom so much advantage against someone with the agility and speed of a unicorn on top of a troll's strength and resilience. And there were so many other potential threats that could extinguish his life. A troll's regeneration would help, but not guarantee invincibility.

At least he was immortal. Still, he'd probably need to reinvent the damned thing yet again, because Voldemort hadn't gotten all the kinks out of his "great creation". Such as requiring a human death. Or, more to the point, not protecting the user against what Harry Potter had done to him. If you're going to make backups of yourself, do it right, and don't set the system to a two-way synchronisation without failsafes...

Still, there was time, and the troll had only been Step One.

Knowing that he had hours to return to the Stone of Permanency to make his new acquisition permanent, Tom took a moment to look up at the stars.

They were shining brightly and steadily. Not wholly above the folly of men, perhaps, but still...

There had been a prophecy that Tom must not look at prophecies. But Dumbledore had said nothing that forbade acquiring the powers of a centaur. Those weren't prophecies; whatever centaurs saw in the projection of their powers upon the starry night never got recorded in the Hall. Tom still hadn't decided if murdering a centaur for their natural powers of Divination was going to be Step Two.

Would doing so help with not-destroying the world? Or would becoming a centaur violate the spirit of the prohibition on prophecies, and somehow cause problems he would have avoided if he only agreed to keep groping around blindly for the path towards an acceptable future? His Vow was silent on the matter, and if that remained true by the time Tom finished his planned research into the subject, that would mean anything went.

And Tom _hated_ groping around blindly.

At least he'd put the centaurs' powers to better use than the original owner. He wouldn't adopt their fatalistic attitude that forbade interfering with fate. What was the point of acquiring foresight, if you still refused to steer away from a course that you could see in advance ended on the rocks? But if you had never questioned how your own powers worked, and thought that you really were getting your predictions from the stars, whose movements wouldn't be affected by anything done by the little creatures on one dusty planet, perhaps it was easy to believe that the job of the seer was to merely accept.

So that would be Step Two. Maybe.

However, what Tom really needed a good, clever plan for what currently looked like Step Three, in his let's-kill-things-for-their-powers subplan.

There was a masterless phoenix somewhere out in the world.

Now that would not be easy.


End file.
